Resistance and intervention through a radical ethical aesthetic: The art of Gu Xiong

This article biographically describes the identity and artistic development of internationally known artist Gu Xiong. Stories of his life during the Cultural Revolution in China and his immigration experience into Canada are expressed and documented through his multiple roles in a community-engaged research study that explores issues of migration, identity, place, displacement, community and the changing nature of geography. Gu Xiong’s unique immigration experiences are contextualized within a mutual encounter of co-shaping between his artist-self and immigrant-self experience. As a cultural worker, created metaphors become the markers of his journey. Despite multiple censorship of his contemporary art and research in his birth country, his approach to creative resistance is a radical ethical aesthetic that unfolds with a neo-vitalist political subjectivity. The outcome is an imminent future vision of hope for a complex world that nourishes individual hybrid identities, interconnected cultures and free societies.